Description

For Freud, famously, the feminine was a dark continent, or a riddle without an answer. This understanding concerns man’s relationship to the question of ‘woman’ but femininity is also a matter of sexuality and gender and therefore of identity and experience. Drawing together leading academics, including film and literary scholars, clinicians and artists from diverse backgrounds, Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema, Culture, Theory speaks to the continued relevance of psychoanalytic understanding in a social and political landscape where ideas of gender and sexuality are undergoing profound changes.

This trans-disciplinary collection crosses boundaries between clinical and psychological discourse and arts and humanities fields to approach the topic of femininity from a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives. From object relations, to Lacan, to queer theory, the essays here revisit and rethink the debates over what the feminine might be. The volume presents a major new work by leading feminist film scholar, Elizabeth Cowie, in which she presents a first intervention on the topic of film and the feminine for over twenty years, as well as a key essay by the prominent artist and psychoanalyst, Bracha Ettinger.

Written by an international selection of contributors, this collection is an indispensible tool for film and literary scholars engaged with psychoanalysts and anybody interested in different approaches to the question of the feminine.

Reviews

"This new and highly readable collection of psychoanalytic essays, which is edited by Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer, provides a timely look at the meanings of femininity and women’s desire as articulated in cinema through a range stimulating and thought-provoking case studies and discussions. The book, which contains chapters from some notable authors in the field of feminist film scholarship and artistic and clinical practice (including Elizabeth Cowie, Bracha L. Ettinger, Vicky Lebeau and Caroline Bainbridge), deploy the ideas of Freud, Lacan, Klein, Riviere, Horney, Deutsch and Irigaray in order to unpack the complexities of the relationships between femininity, psychoanalysis and difference that will be of great interest to students and researchers who continue to tussle with the meanings of femininity in the contemporary cultural arena of cinema and beyond. The collection covers a lot of ground – revisiting older debates about the feminist politics of visual pleasure but adds a new layer of complexity to those earlier discussions by relating them to psychosocial and cultural concerns in contemporary contexts where the vexed relationship between intersectionality and psychoanalysis often comes to the fore. In so doing, the collection demonstrates its cultural and political relevance by paying attention to the unconscious dynamics of representation and to the raced and classed dimensions of cinematic experience and its relationship to wider processes of power and ideology." Candida Yates, Professor of Culture and Communication, Bournemouth University, UK

"This collective effort to think and rethink the psychoanalytic take on femininity could not come at a more appropriate time. Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema, Culture, Theory purses different facets of this question in a formidably interesting way, following a wide range of authors and critical approaches. – A truly engaged and engaging volume." - Alenka Zupancic Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, author of What is Sex?

About the Editors

Agnieszka Piotrowska is an award-winning filmmaker and theorist, best known for her iconic documentary Married to the Eiffel Tower. She is the author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film, Black and White and The Nasty Woman and the Neo Femme Fatale in Contemporary Cinema,and editor of Embodied Encounters and co-editor of Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable.

Ben Tyrer is a film theorist and lecturer. He is the author of works on cinema, psychoanalysis and philosophy, and is the co-editor of Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable.